Amazon is hurting LOTS of people

[PatrickforO]

35. How many on this thread, I wonder, are members of Amazon Prime?

I am, and it is something I would not want to do without.

BUT

This.

So the question to all of us is how much convenience we are willing give up for the sake of fellow workers?

One last thought: What if we made it so that corporations doing any business in the American market had to change their corporate charters to expand the fiduciary responsibility of their officers beyond just increasing earnings for shareholders? What if we expanded these corporate charters to include worker and consumer welfare and the environment?

Because right now, the CEO of Amazon is doing his proper job - he crushed unions to keep labor costs down, and runs the warehouses hot to save utility costs. Why? Because his ONLY job as a corporate officer is to increase shareholder earnings. That's it.

We should try and get the expansion of fiduciary responsibility in corporate charters on our platform. Elizabeth Warren has begun talking about this, too. It's a good idea, because if a hundred, or a thousand, or ten thousand people from here boycott Amazon, they won't change. Wal-Mart has been boycotted for years now, and they are still doing great. For shareholders. For workers, not so much.

And, how many on this thread, I wonder, drink coffee? I do. What about that? Does the coffee I'm drinking come from a place where they use brutal child labor practices?

See...this is why I hate capitalism. Not hard work. Not entrepreneurship. Not progress. But capitalism. To put profits above all else is the root of most all the evils we preach against. The very earth itself is in danger due to the profit motive. Sure, the market has spoken about solar and wind power, but big oil is still paying 'scientist' hacks to write papers casting doubt that the greenhouse effect is real. They are blaming cow farts, you know, when they should be blaming the beef industry for leveling all those rain forests.

Anyway, good post. But we have to think this through if we're going to effect any real change, don't we?